Project 365. Day One - January 1 2013

Project 365? Maybe....

So I have been motivated to start project 365 - a project whereby I post an image per day.  Right now, I am planning on shooting one image per day and posting it on this blog.  So far, so good.  Day 1, image #1.  Let's see how far this goes.

Here's the final image.  I tried to capture the fear that Rudolph was feeling when he meets the Bumble in the cave.  Using hard lighting and a black background, I attempted to capture the moment.  I think it's pretty good.

No, it probably won't win any awards, but I was sitting at dinner tonight looking at this statue and thinking of what I could do with it.  A couple of flashes mounted off camera and a home made snoot, and voila.  It's a start.

Here's the process.  I got it all set up using the following setup.

At first, I was using one light and lighting the whole setup.  I used F18 at ISO400 to totally remove the ambient light - thus removing the chairs from the background.

The camera is mounted on a tripod for repeatability.  Theshutter speed is 1/250 so it can be handheld, but it's better this way.  Also, framing using liveview on a larger aperture was very handy.

That allowed me to see Rudolph and the Bumble.  But it was not a good clear shot of Rudolph.  Because of the way he is facing the Bumble, you can't see his face or his red nose.  So I took the second flash, off to the right, and put a home made snoot on it and aimed it right at his nose.


Here you can see how I lit Rudolph from the side to get his nose.  This light was set to -2 stops so as to only light the nose and part of the face.

The snoot on the flash above is made using a single sheet of 8X14 paper folded into a cone and held on using scotch tape.  (well, dollar store brand not scotch brand tape).  Quick, easy and cheap.  I used my gorillapod to raise the flash as well.

Side by side, the first image without the lit nose and then the second image with the second light.  With the snoot, I was able to get the nose lit to the right level without adding too much light to the overall image.  I did end up opening up the shadows on the Bumble's belly, but it did not take much away from the shot.

 

So there you go.   Day one done.  Now, I just hope I can keep this up.  I see that my last post was April of 2012.  That's far too long.